


Something Wicked

by SanSanFanFan



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Before the Church, Crowley wakes up..., Crowley's love language is service, Got a bit darker, Got longer, M/M, Pining, Was going to be a fluffy one shot, Working behind the scenes before the church, World War II, Written to explain why the Nazis recognise Anthony J. Crowley in the church
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-20 05:51:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19370776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SanSanFanFan/pseuds/SanSanFanFan
Summary: Crowley sleeps in the Arizona desert for seventy-five years until a feeling of something being very wrong wakes him. Then he has to return to London as the war starts. He has to return to his angel.A story of Nazi punching and angel adoring :)





	1. "By the Pricking of My Thumbs"

Arizona, 1939

Crowley does not actually have thumbs at the moment when the pricking starts. But some things overwrite anatomy. Some things are more about the _meta_ than the _physics_.

The pricking feeling is an insistent and increasing ‘click click click’, like a Geiger counter deep inside him is reacting to a bloom of deathly radiation in the world about him. The change makes his sluggish tongue emerge to taste the air as the tip of his tail shivers to the beat of the pricking. Then his coils slide over each other as his long sleep finally sheds from him like older skin.

Its as hot as humans think hell is under the flat rock, but it’s when he’s out of its shadows that he’s really glared upon by the relentless sun, watching him uncurl onto the desert floor. A reluctant glance back to his sleeping hole and then he’s off, a black line racing across the sand and rocks.

Two hours later, during which time a buzzard – wanting its biggest _ever_ meal - has found its each and every swooping strike ending in a beak flattening smash against nearby boulders, Crowley reaches a scattering of buildings around a dusty road. Drivers are steering a train of covered wagons through the dust clouds, refusing to give the oxen their heads. Men on horseback are glaring silently with sun-dried skin at women in plain spun dresses and bonnets. Above them, on a building, a sign in white paint calls this the ‘Stage Depot, Tucson’. And Crowley is confused.

Back in 1862 when he’d first come west for the heat and a quiet place to sleep there had depots just like this. But not here. Places where so-called ‘cowboys’ lived and died hard in the desert. But not here. And if his internal clock (not the thing still ticking inside him with the growth of something…wicked… in the world) was right, then he’s slept about seventy-five years. Give or take.

And one thing he knows about humans is that they are almost as changeable as he is; slipping on new skins and showing off new tricks. He slithers closer to get a better sense of what’s going on and is nearly run over by a bunch of men perched on a trolley-like thing being pushed on rails by other men, red-faced and sweating heavily. The sitting men are pointing some great dark eye at the crowds and paying particular attention to a couple talking on the other side of the barely there street. _Ahhh_ , thinks Crowley, _new technology!_ His tongue flicks out to taste it, and he gets a bouquet of celluloid, pretence, and desperation for fame. He’s taken back to a zoetrope he’d once walked past in Soho being demonstrated. It had been showing a cute little film about ‘What the Butler Saw’ that had made red flourishes appear on Azir- on _his_ cheeks.

His mood darkens with the memory, which comes skipping into his mind hand in hand with a bunch of other memories from before his long sleep. The urge to bite someone’s ankle grows, but he forces it down. He’s been in his serpent form for too damn long!

Two legs later, and he’s exploring what he now knows from overhearing conversations is something called a ‘set’. They’re making a thing called a ‘film’ for the modern zoetrope that’s called ‘Arizona’. This film is set just before he’d given up consciousness and found a nice rock to sleep under just a few miles off into the desert from the set, which explains the strange sense that no time at all has passed. But doesn’t go anywhere to explaining why the ambient evil in the world is setting off his inner alarms. ‘Film’ tastes like one of his lot’s projects, so maybe he can take credit for it later, but that's not what’s woken him up now.

He emerges from shadows to hypnoptise a passing actor as they walk down an alleyway away from the others. Crowley uses them as a quick mirror to judge how his appearance fits or doesn’t, this new time. At first, they think he’s an accurately dressed extra, but then he makes them see him as someone important - someone **stylish**. _Mutton chops?_ Their confused mind asks in their daze, _who wears mutton chops now?_ The hair vanishes immediately, along with the black top hat that had last worked for him in the 1860s. Clothes wise he goes for a black suit, pulling the image of it from the actor’s - William something - memory of a meeting with someone called a ‘studio boss’. Anyone else would be near fainting in a black get-up like this, complete with a black trilby, under the height of the Arizona sun, but Crowley feels as though he’s recharged and ready for action! A quick seventy-five year nap will do that for you!

It's only when he’s on a train heading east – these things have really taken off in the last century and a bit – that he thinks to summon up a copy of _The Infernal Times_ to catch up with what his lot have been up to. The headline sets off that click click click again, and now he knows that’s woken him, what fresh hell Hell has been up to.

‘War!!!!!!’ it proclaims with six jubilant exclamation points, and for a sickening moment, he thinks that up top and down below have finally gotten into it, and he almost uses a demonic miracle to get him to a corner book shop near Greek Street in Soho much much quicker. But scanning the lines below, he’s pretty sure – apart from the odd nudge by downstairs (and he hasn’t been around to help with that!) – that this is all the work of the tangled minds of the humans. Horrible facts filter into his mind from the paper and fill in the last decades. There had been another time like this, and somehow he’d managed to sleep through that first World War. Something was very different about this one… and Crowley was going to find out what.

He arrives in a London full of the hum and roar of war. The militant patriotism is thick in the air, but Crowley slouches along his favourite streets suspecting that by the end of it all things will be very different. There are multi-coloured posters in Mayfair calling on young men to sign up for duty, and when he gets to his flat he finds the charlady – an elderly descendent of the woman he’d hired back in the 1850s when he bought the place – talking animatedly about her grandson’s smart new uniform to a disinterested messenger. A few tweaks of her memories later and she’s happily hoovering the hallway outside the flat of the Mr Crowley who’s been living there for a while. A nice bachelor that Mr Crowley. Odd that she’s never asked about his first name before, but he did promise he’d think about one and get back to her soon.

Crowley feels drawn to Soho like it’s his magnetic pole, but he manages to hold off for a week or so more. In that time, he’s visited by a few demons. They come in over the airwaves of his radio or insert themselves into the posters. They pop by to congratulate him for this or that thing that’s going on over in continental Europe. Not a single one seems to have noticed his absence, and he doesn’t know whether to be cheered by that or glum.

Finally though, one of them mentions that there are actually Nazis _in_ London while cheering him on for his temptation of ordinary Brits into their service, and that click click click of the Geiger counter goes off again. Something Wicked this Way Comes, he hums to himself as he finds himself in front of a mirror and working out what to say to his old adversary while a nervous knot grows in his stomach. Because why else would he have woken up? The angel is in trouble.


	2. "You Are Named After the Dog?!"

Soho, 1939

Crowley punches his first Nazi in the upstairs parlour of the Coach and Horses on Great Marlborough Street on a Thursday afternoon. He has, of course, a thousand and one more demonic ways to deal with the man – face melting comes to mind sometime later on - than mashing his knuckles into his squishy cheek. But he has to admit there is something satisfying about doing it the human way.  The pleasing sound of the punch’s thunk and then the crash as the man stumbles back into chairs, tables, a few Londoner’s pints is only beaten by the man near pissing himself as he curses in German and then gets dragged off to the nearest Bobby.

The punch comes after a sneaky few hours spent curled up in the landlord’s bulldog’s basket in a much smaller snake form, listening in as this ‘Professor Smythe’ flatters and bamboozles the angel. Smythe’s not the first Nazi Crowley’s spotted about Soho. In fact, Aziraphale might just have the perfect combination of apparent naivety, absent-minded Britishness, and knowledge about ancient texts that quite a few Nazi agents are looking for right now. He attracts them like a bright golden flower does bees, and at first, Crowley puts a lot of thought into making some kind of metaphysical bug spray. But punching works as well.

The punch comes once Aziraphale has departed the pub, full of joy over ‘bumping into’ a visiting Oxford don with the same love of ancient prophetic texts as him. Crowley’s rage is _so much_ greater because the angel’s open and friendly nature has been so badly taken advantage of. Because Aziraphale is _happy_ about the chat. But even full of burning hot rage, he’s careful not to scare Anthony, the bulldog, as he slithers off to a dark shadow of the smoky pub in order to return to his human-like form. The old dog has accommodated the snake for so many hours in return for the promise of a lamb shank bone that Crowley makes good on straight away, and as Crowley stalks towards the man, the sound of happy crunching fills the upstairs room.

“Excuse me.” Crowley says politely as he approaches the ‘professor’, a pointy-faced man busy scribbling away in code in a notebook about his success with ‘Mr Fell’ and his hopes to get specific books from him.

The man looks up to see a pair of disturbing yellow eyes looking at him over the rims of sunglasses before his sight explodes into a nebula of stars.

The next Nazi walks out of Aziraphale’s shop and passes by a dark alley. Only a slight ‘oof’ noise emerges from his mouth before he disappears into the shadows down there.

By the fourth one, messages have been sent back to the Motherland about the number of agents the British police are somehow stumbling across. Coded worries about ‘a man in black’ sighted around Soho and Mayfair then become more frantic messages about a stalker with odd eyes that their people jibber and jabber about incoherently to the police when they’re found, bound and gagged, on their doorsteps.

Unfortunately, Hell is keen on letting this war run and run. They do have humans that they’re prompting on both sides, but they’ve been genuinely impressed – even a little awed – by the creative evil of the Nazis in particular. A few sharp remarks from down below about enabling the Nazis in London come Crowley’s way via the wireless and he knows he’s risking a lot by taking them out one by one.

So, with the eleventh Nazi – a homegrown one, some British lord with ‘ideas’ about the superiority of his skin colour over others’ – Crowley decides he needs to be a bit more creative. Instead of vicious pugilation or abduction followed by exposing the double agent to the authorities, he shifts his smart suits into something a little more shabby and with elbow patches. Black is a hard habit to crack, so he settles on a very dark tweed.

It’s simple then to arrange a way to accidentally bump into the man in a Bloomsbury street and to drop a copy of the British School of Archaeology report on John Garstang’s excavation of Jericho with the word ‘prophecy???’ scribbled in his hand on the front. Tea at the British museum round the corner follows as the unlordly lord tries to delicately pump ‘Professor Anthony Crowley’ for information about the possible locations of some rather powerful religious relics and texts.

“The Lance of Longinus?”

Crowley hmmms and ummms in a way that he thinks Aziraphale would be proud of. He temples his fingertips and frowns behind his glasses as the man leans forward, hungrily. That one’s deep in the Mariana Trench, thank Satan. “I recall a reference in a scroll in a private collection in Turkey. You could start there-”

“Hmmm.” The man is impatient but trying to appear as though disappointment doesn’t matter, “How about the Sword of Eden??”

Crowley remembers it well. Aziraphale was kind, too kind maybe, to give it to Adam. But if it’s out there still, and the thought of it in human hands again… Nazi hands… is a little terrifying, even to a supernatural creature like him. Very little could stand against that flame. An idea pops into his head then.

“Ah no. I’m afraid not,” He says, with his best impersonation of Aziraphale’s polite and sweet response for customers seeking any of his books that he knows he has in stock, but really doesn’t want to sell, “But… no, no maybe it’s nothing. But it would be quite the find if it were true. I would follow up on it myself but I do not have the resources for an expedition at this time. But, oh, it would be a find!”

He knows he’s hooked the lord, as he leans a little closer, his finger twiddling nervously with the spoon in his cup of tea. “Yes?”

“The Ark. Of the Covenant.” He watches the lord’s eyes start to gleam with avarice and dreams of the Fuhrer’s pleasure. “I have a translation of a papyrus suggesting the location of the city of Tanis, where the Pharoah Shishak placed the Ark.”

“I must have it!”

“It could be bunk.” Crowley shrugs and sips his tea watching the lord’s growing interest. He knows where the Ark is in Tanis, of course, but he won’t give him the precise location. Sending the agents in London off after the Ark has no downsides. If they don’t find it, they’ll spend years digging about in the sand and stay away from the angel. And if they do manage to find it they’ll probably try to open it and then get their faces melted off by divine retribution – oh wait, he should have done that to the one in the pub, darn it!

“I will pay whatever you need to hand over this document.” The lord splutters, his face red and his eyes gleaming.

“Of course, if the Ark is found, it should be placed in a museum.” He gestures about them, teasing the ‘poor’ fascist, “It belongs in a museum.”

The man barely hides his ‘sneaky’ smile, “Of course, my good man. Of course!”

“Then I see no problem in passing over my translation. For a fee.”

They say their polite goodbyes and shake on the deal. Crowley then spends a very fun afternoon conjuring several fake versions of the Tanis document. Each suggests a different location for the city lost to the dunes. And each has a different set of in-jokes in the text only he, or Aziraphale, would get. After getting one copy to the lord and relieving him of a few hundred quid - that Crowley almost immediately loses somewhere in the region of a betting shop, an orphanage, or a pub… he’s not which sure - he sets about bumping into a few more Nazis seeking religious artefacts of mass destruction.

For a while, that’s enough to keep the bees away from the flower. Until one day, Aziraphale agrees to sell some books to some Nazis, thinking that the best place to make the exchange is a blessed _church_.

Crowley’s curses are in the deep old language, and across London glass windows warp, chunks of ice fall from the sky, and ducks fly backwards.


End file.
